Rediff.com has lost a fan

I have been an avid follower of the site rediff.com for the past 15+ years. It was the source of news for me when I was abroad and it continued to be so even after I came back to India.

The news was presented as soon as possible and it had great writers in Varsha Bhosale, Prem Paniker, George Iype, Francios Gautier, T V R Shenoy, Dilip D’Souza (many of them may not have been on the rolls of rediff, but they contributed great columns to rediff.com).

The page was simple and one could get to what one wanted without any noise.

Over the period of time the timeliness of the news has become worse and worse (only improvement is possibly the cricket scores) and the writers have disappeared. To make it worse first rediff started with popup ads (they still have, but I think it is disabled on my browsers, thanks to the ad block plugins) which obscured the news one was trying to read.

Then ads started intruding into the main page. The right two columns of the first page used to be filled with ads, beckoning one to buy low quality products at seemingly inexpensive prices. While this was irritating I had made it a habit to ignore the right two columns and still continued.

Now for the past few weeks rediff has started mixing ads with its columns. This means that the first page has become very disturbing and one cannot concentrate on what one really wants to get from the site.

They have lost one fan of long years. They may go on to gather more fans, but I will not be one of them.